Tag Archives: Ta-Nehisi Coates

But whenever I visited any of the [USA Civil War] battlefields, I felt like I was greeted as if I were a nosy accountant conducting an audit and someone was trying to hide the books. I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve.

I tried to say something similar in my review of Robert Hicks’s The Widow of the South, but I failed to say it as clearly and succinctly. I guess that’s why TNC is the best-selling author and I’m blogging.